On-line merchant sites on the Internet are known, offering material or immaterial goods or services. These sites and the means that they use have been optimized for potential clients using a computer as a means for accessing offers, carrying out transactions and optionally to receive the object of the transaction when it is for example musical or audiovisual content. Moreover, the traditional on-line merchant sites offer in a single entity the management of the presentation of the offer, the transaction, invoicing, and delivery of the goods or services.
Moreover solutions are known such as “Opera mini” which enable any web pages to be browsed from portable devices such as new generation mobile phones.
Solutions are also known such as those described in U.S. Pat. No. 7,003,793 for offering video on demand on portable terminals via wireless telecommunications infrastructures.
State of the art solutions raise a number of problems, such as browsing within an offer where the presentation has been designed to be viewed on a large screen with interactivity relying on sophisticated and precise means such as for example a mouse. Viewing pages rich in information on small-size screens, even where they have good resolution and are touch-sensitive, remains problematic. Moreover the web pages presented on merchant sites increasingly include animated objects or video to make them attractive, for example using “Macromedia/Adobe” flash and/or flash video solutions. Reproduction of these animated objects is problematic on low-cost and/or low power technical platforms having limited resources and/or processing capabilities both in terms of reproduction means and computing power. Moreover, the procedures implemented to perform secure transactions generally rely on substantially proprietary solutions or also are associated with a computer operating system such as those of Microsoft or Apple which are impossible to implement in portable electronic equipment which is low cost and/or relies on other operating systems. Finally, the only viable solutions in the state of the art rely on the vertical integration of the whole procedure from the e-commerce platform to the supply of the solutions to access it, in the form of hardware and/or software. Nevertheless, the vertical solutions present potential security weaknesses in that they rely in part on the running of programs on end user's computer that are not controlled by the client terminal. Solutions enabling web pages to be browsed from portable electronic devices such as mobile phones after sifting and compression of standard web pages are not sufficiently ergonomic to satisfy the requirements of on-line commerce which simultaneously requires quality of service, security, attractiveness to clients and ease of use. Automatic conversion solutions such as “Opera mini” are attractive in theory due to the universality of the ability to browse the internet as a whole. However in practice these solutions cannot be implemented for e-commerce, as they do not offer the required characteristics detailed above.